It's simple. How many instant/sorceries you need for Spellheart Chimera be playable ? How many for it to be truly good ?
I'm struggling with the numbers a lot. Theros has a high amount of enchantments, diluting the amount of instant/sorceries you normally play. In a usual set Spellheart Chimera would be a absurd bomb for sure.
Spellheart Chimera is okay, but not great, and probably not even good. It gets some benefit from sorceries and instants, and is a pretty good target for bestow. The main problem is obviously that it takes a long time and alot of work to make it a reasonable threat.
Nimbus Naiad is much better and is also a common. You see approximately 50x more Nimbus Naiads than Spellheart Chimeras for a reason ...
Regarding the win-percentage, the spreadsheets from Sene made me realize how big the gap is between a mediocre player like me and more dedicated and talented players, but it shouldn't make me or aforementioned newcomers upset. It's all about your ego and expectations. I'm playing magic for fun and consider it just as another hobby. This doesn't imply I LIKE losing, but after all its just a game.
That is a very good attitude that will serve very well in a game like Magic. Sometimes I forget it's all for fun and get upset when my opponent pulls off an incredible topdeck or just has the perfect draw to foil my every move; but I think I should strive to remember that everyone deserves to topdeck or to have a vicious draw sometimes, not just me ...
Doesn't stop me from grumbling a bit in game (usually I say something like "unreal draw man" before conceding), which I am not proud of, but I seem unable to not at least let that little bit of frustration out.
I'm still wondering though. What strengths/weaknesses mentioned in this thread are downplayed (or accentuated(?)) in sealed as compared to draft?
I think that several people pointed out the fact that RTR had a few viable archetypes and so became repetitive after a while, which downgraded their RTR rating. I would propose that sealed reduces this problem somewhat, because you can't force an archetype as you can in a draft (picking the best cards for that archetype in draft both gives you a better chance to build a deck that follows that archetype, at the same time keeping others out of that archetype because they're not getting the archetype staples that you're taking out of the pool). In sealed you can try to play archetypes but only some pools will support any given archetype, or even any particular archetype at all.
By the end of RTR, when the phantom pools were introduced (best thing by far to happen to Magic Online in a long, long time, for me), I found that I was enjoying them even more than drafting because each game felt different and fresh, rather than being a rehash of the same strong archetypes over and over again.
I think that color balance issues affect draft and sealed differently. In draft, colors that are inherently weaker can still be good to go into because if it's generally recognized that a color is weak, people will be less likely to take it which means that the drafter that takes the risk of going into that color may be rewarded with a larger number of cards that are the best from that otherwise weak color, and the sum total of the best cards from a weak color over the course of a draft may very easily be better than what you get from fighting over the pool of cards of a 'good' color.
In sealed on the other hand, if a color is generally weaker than the others, you will invariably end up playing it less than the other colors because you will on average be getting an average pool of cards from each color. So the weaker color will less often present a set of cards of higher quality than those available from other colors in the pool.
Therefore I think that color balance issues have a greater negative impact on sealed than draft, but that sealed tends to outlast draft a bit for players who play alot and get tired of playing with or against the same or similar decks all of the time.
Thing is, I can easily sympathise with that, but what was going on there is one of two things:
1) The table had allowed your opponent to draft an absurd deck by passing too many good cards. It's the equivalent of a deck with three Wingsteed Riders, Favoured Hoplite, Phalanx Leader and a bunch of tricks, bestows and Ordeals in Theros.
I don't agree that it's the equivalent deck. The Gnaw to the Bone/Spider Spawning deck that hit me three or four times ande made me quit Magic until RTR came out, is one that only works (I believe) if you have multiples of some uncommons and some specific support cards. And it's one that, if you get most but not all of what you need, is a deck that is very likely to fall completely flat on its face. Which makes it a risky deck to attempt to draft unless you're the guy who just happened to be in the right chair at the table, and even then is still somewhat risky.
Most people aren't going to take those risks, and for good reasons.
On the other hand, most of the cards in a Theros deck playing heroic synergies are decent on their own, and you can win the game handily without your game going exactly to plan, making it a much less risky type of deck to draft.
Also, I don't understand this concept of "allowed your opponent to draft an absurd deck". I never "allow" my opponents to do anything; I just draft the deck the best that I can, considering each card for its value in my deck, and leave the rest to the others (or at least, I try to; bad habits creep in and sometimes I'll take the off-color bomb rare just because I can't stand to let someone else have it!).
2) Or alternatively, you were maybe reluctant to draft the archetypes that beat the less absurd self-mill builds? W/G Humans and G/R Werewolves are both fast enough, but you have to be prepared to pick cards like Elder Cathar and Villagers of Estwald really highly to make these decks work.
I think this is closer to the truth. First, I'm not a very good drafter, and I was considerably worse during ISD block. So I didn't really have a plan for hedging my bets against the blue/green self-mill deck, my only plan was to try to assemble my best deck and let the chips fall where they may. And because of my poor drafting skills I likely didn't end up with the most competitive deck anyway.
And second, I was completely opposed to trying to draft the self-mill deck myself. I didn't want to have it played against me, and I didn't want to play it against anyone else either. If one out of 1000 cards had a razor blade in it that you could use to threaten your opponent into conceding the game, I wouldn't pick that either because it's not the way I want to play. I'd just quit playing a game that had that kind of dynamic in it. Which is why I quit playing ISD, mostly to spite Wizards for creating a game that had so much appeal to me and yet so often forced me into playing a match that just pissed me off immeasurably.
Basically what it comes down to is that if your opponent can take their time and flashback Gnaw to the Bone and Spider Spawning with most of their library in the 'yard, something's gone very wrong!
Not sure if you ever played against this deck. Invariably there'd be multiples of Armored Skaab, Selhoff Occultist, to put up a defensive wall to give the deck time to act, along with bounce and counterspells for disruption. Also if you're not used to "something going wrong" in a game of Magic, then you must be playing a very different game than I am, where "something going wrong" for one player or another is the deciding factor in 90% of games!
I am actually not impressed at all with Theros. The voltron aspect in light of very expensive hard removal is a little bit much. The other day I had a freaking Favored Hoplite up to a 9/11 lifelinker. If you're not in blue, there's really no way to stop that because Sip of Hemlock is too damn slow. I ended at 38 life or something stupid. He was R/G, so no hope whatsoever for him.
I too have noticed that a large number of Theros games end with one player at 30+ life and the other at 0. The set seems conducive to blowouts - whoever's lifelinked voltron survives is the winner.
ISD-ISD-ISD: A
I don't agree that this was the best draft format ever - some of the fast tribal draws were just a bit too unstoppable - but it certainly comes close. Also, much better online than with real cards, because double-faced cards really did cross the line a bit.
Another 'A' for triple ISD, I guess that's the clear consensus. I must be the only one who really didn't like the format, specifically because at least 20% of the time, I'd face at least one opponent per draft who wasn't even playing the same game as I was. They were just throwing their cards into their graveyard as fast as possible and only loosely interacting with the board, on the way to gaining 30 life from their graveyard and then spawning a zillion spiders for the win. Those games were so boring, frustrating, and pointless for me that the mere chance of having to play one took away all of my desire to play the format at all.
Battle: In a word, no. It would have unduly unbalanced the guilds in favor of the RTR ones.
More formally, there would be a higher risk to trying to draft a GTC guild over a RTR guild because of various factors.
Arguably, you can also say the reverse. Someone who wanted to draft, say, Orzhov in GTC could try to cut white and black in RTR to try to get the good Orzhov cards--if any existed--in GTC.
Either way, you are inherently biasing the archetype choices due to draft order.
About the only difference you could say for sure is that the format would probably have been more 'draft good gold cards in first two packs, and then draft your fixing in pack 3'. Which reduces the DGM pack to basically being a fixing pack, and I don't think that's very desirable either.
I disagree with this assessment. I didn't play any DGR at all (I quit Magic for ~8 months when GTC came out) but I drafted 3x RTR alot and back in the day, drafted the entire Ravnica block pretty heavily.
You'd think that the original Ravnica block would have suffered also from what you suggested - that the guild balance would have shifted towards the Ravnica guilds. But in fact what actually happened is that it encouraged multicolor decks. Since the first pack tended to pull everyone into one of the BG, UB, WR, and WG color combinations, and since those color combinations were not available in subsequent packs (at least for multicolored cards), you naturally had to shift into a three color deck when the second pack came around. In fact people anticipated this and so you'd plan what three colors you were going to try to be in while picking cards in the first pack.
I suspect that a RGD order for the RTR block would have had a similar effect: people would take good cards in the guild colors of RTR but would expect that they'd have to have a third color in their back pocket in order to be able to take a guild (or pair of guilds) from GTC as well. I believe this order would actually have done what it seems lots of people wanted the RTR block design to do - make 3+ colored decks the norm.
Hi, I found this build to be challenging. Here is the card pool:
I felt like there were good cards in every color but it was hard for me to pick just two colors that had enough depth and would pair well together. Here is what I went with:
I don't know if my build was good or not. I am not super experienced with Theros and haven't played Magic much in the past year. I built what I did because I felt like I had some good fat green creatures and a good quantity of accelerators to get to them.
For what it's worth, I went win-loss-win for a 2-1 record.
Spellheart Chimera is okay, but not great, and probably not even good. It gets some benefit from sorceries and instants, and is a pretty good target for bestow. The main problem is obviously that it takes a long time and alot of work to make it a reasonable threat.
Nimbus Naiad is much better and is also a common. You see approximately 50x more Nimbus Naiads than Spellheart Chimeras for a reason ...
That is a very good attitude that will serve very well in a game like Magic. Sometimes I forget it's all for fun and get upset when my opponent pulls off an incredible topdeck or just has the perfect draw to foil my every move; but I think I should strive to remember that everyone deserves to topdeck or to have a vicious draw sometimes, not just me
Doesn't stop me from grumbling a bit in game (usually I say something like "unreal draw man" before conceding), which I am not proud of, but I seem unable to not at least let that little bit of frustration out.
I think that several people pointed out the fact that RTR had a few viable archetypes and so became repetitive after a while, which downgraded their RTR rating. I would propose that sealed reduces this problem somewhat, because you can't force an archetype as you can in a draft (picking the best cards for that archetype in draft both gives you a better chance to build a deck that follows that archetype, at the same time keeping others out of that archetype because they're not getting the archetype staples that you're taking out of the pool). In sealed you can try to play archetypes but only some pools will support any given archetype, or even any particular archetype at all.
By the end of RTR, when the phantom pools were introduced (best thing by far to happen to Magic Online in a long, long time, for me), I found that I was enjoying them even more than drafting because each game felt different and fresh, rather than being a rehash of the same strong archetypes over and over again.
I think that color balance issues affect draft and sealed differently. In draft, colors that are inherently weaker can still be good to go into because if it's generally recognized that a color is weak, people will be less likely to take it which means that the drafter that takes the risk of going into that color may be rewarded with a larger number of cards that are the best from that otherwise weak color, and the sum total of the best cards from a weak color over the course of a draft may very easily be better than what you get from fighting over the pool of cards of a 'good' color.
In sealed on the other hand, if a color is generally weaker than the others, you will invariably end up playing it less than the other colors because you will on average be getting an average pool of cards from each color. So the weaker color will less often present a set of cards of higher quality than those available from other colors in the pool.
Therefore I think that color balance issues have a greater negative impact on sealed than draft, but that sealed tends to outlast draft a bit for players who play alot and get tired of playing with or against the same or similar decks all of the time.
I don't agree that it's the equivalent deck. The Gnaw to the Bone/Spider Spawning deck that hit me three or four times ande made me quit Magic until RTR came out, is one that only works (I believe) if you have multiples of some uncommons and some specific support cards. And it's one that, if you get most but not all of what you need, is a deck that is very likely to fall completely flat on its face. Which makes it a risky deck to attempt to draft unless you're the guy who just happened to be in the right chair at the table, and even then is still somewhat risky.
Most people aren't going to take those risks, and for good reasons.
On the other hand, most of the cards in a Theros deck playing heroic synergies are decent on their own, and you can win the game handily without your game going exactly to plan, making it a much less risky type of deck to draft.
Also, I don't understand this concept of "allowed your opponent to draft an absurd deck". I never "allow" my opponents to do anything; I just draft the deck the best that I can, considering each card for its value in my deck, and leave the rest to the others (or at least, I try to; bad habits creep in and sometimes I'll take the off-color bomb rare just because I can't stand to let someone else have it!).
I think this is closer to the truth. First, I'm not a very good drafter, and I was considerably worse during ISD block. So I didn't really have a plan for hedging my bets against the blue/green self-mill deck, my only plan was to try to assemble my best deck and let the chips fall where they may. And because of my poor drafting skills I likely didn't end up with the most competitive deck anyway.
And second, I was completely opposed to trying to draft the self-mill deck myself. I didn't want to have it played against me, and I didn't want to play it against anyone else either. If one out of 1000 cards had a razor blade in it that you could use to threaten your opponent into conceding the game, I wouldn't pick that either because it's not the way I want to play. I'd just quit playing a game that had that kind of dynamic in it. Which is why I quit playing ISD, mostly to spite Wizards for creating a game that had so much appeal to me and yet so often forced me into playing a match that just pissed me off immeasurably.
Not sure if you ever played against this deck. Invariably there'd be multiples of Armored Skaab, Selhoff Occultist, to put up a defensive wall to give the deck time to act, along with bounce and counterspells for disruption. Also if you're not used to "something going wrong" in a game of Magic, then you must be playing a very different game than I am, where "something going wrong" for one player or another is the deciding factor in 90% of games!
I too have noticed that a large number of Theros games end with one player at 30+ life and the other at 0. The set seems conducive to blowouts - whoever's lifelinked voltron survives is the winner.
Another 'A' for triple ISD, I guess that's the clear consensus. I must be the only one who really didn't like the format, specifically because at least 20% of the time, I'd face at least one opponent per draft who wasn't even playing the same game as I was. They were just throwing their cards into their graveyard as fast as possible and only loosely interacting with the board, on the way to gaining 30 life from their graveyard and then spawning a zillion spiders for the win. Those games were so boring, frustrating, and pointless for me that the mere chance of having to play one took away all of my desire to play the format at all.
I disagree with this assessment. I didn't play any DGR at all (I quit Magic for ~8 months when GTC came out) but I drafted 3x RTR alot and back in the day, drafted the entire Ravnica block pretty heavily.
You'd think that the original Ravnica block would have suffered also from what you suggested - that the guild balance would have shifted towards the Ravnica guilds. But in fact what actually happened is that it encouraged multicolor decks. Since the first pack tended to pull everyone into one of the BG, UB, WR, and WG color combinations, and since those color combinations were not available in subsequent packs (at least for multicolored cards), you naturally had to shift into a three color deck when the second pack came around. In fact people anticipated this and so you'd plan what three colors you were going to try to be in while picking cards in the first pack.
I suspect that a RGD order for the RTR block would have had a similar effect: people would take good cards in the guild colors of RTR but would expect that they'd have to have a third color in their back pocket in order to be able to take a guild (or pair of guilds) from GTC as well. I believe this order would actually have done what it seems lots of people wanted the RTR block design to do - make 3+ colored decks the norm.
I felt like there were good cards in every color but it was hard for me to pick just two colors that had enough depth and would pair well together. Here is what I went with:
I don't know if my build was good or not. I am not super experienced with Theros and haven't played Magic much in the past year. I built what I did because I felt like I had some good fat green creatures and a good quantity of accelerators to get to them.
For what it's worth, I went win-loss-win for a 2-1 record.
Thank you!